The Syfy channel recently released the “First Look” trailer for its 12-episode series adapting Lev Grossman’s The Magicians (Plume; Penguin Audio; OverDrive Sample) which will air sometime in 2016.

The series stars Jason Ralph (he has appeared on TV series Madam Secretary and Gossip Girl and in films such as A Most Violent Year) as Quentin Coldwater, a new recruit at the Brakebills College, a school of magic.

As we noted before, the Syfy channel has several book adaptations in the works.

The film adaptation of the 2012 best seller by Jo Jo Moyes, Me Before You (Penguin/Pamela Dorman) is has been rescheduled for release on June 3, 2016, moved nearly a year from its original  Aug. 21, 2015 date.

Starring Emilia Clarke (Game of Thrones) and Sam Claflin (The Hunger Games), it is directed by Thea Sharrock. This will be her first feature film, after directing the BBC miniseries The Hollow Crown and Call The Midwife. as well as several theatrical productions.

The book’s sequel After You, (Penguin/Pamela Dorman; Penguin Audio) has been announced for September (DRC’s are not available yet, but look for galleys at ALA).

The Daily Mail publishes scenes from the the movie set in Wales,

After several attempts to adapt it as a movie, Caleb Carr’s best selling 1994 psychological thriller set in gilded age era New York, The Alienist is now headed to the small screen, as an 8-part series for TNT with Cary Fukunaga (True Detective) attached to direct.

Deadline reports this is part of a shift in the focus for the network towards  “edgier original programming.”

The series still has to be cast and filmed, so it will be at least a year until it comes to fruition, depending on Fukunaga’s schedule. He just completed work on Beasts of No Nation, based on the novel by Uzodinma Iweala, for Netflix and is gearing up for an adaptation of Stephen King’s IT. Variety reports that Will Poulter is currently in negotiations to play the demonic clown Pennywise.

Word of mouth seems to growing for Jessica Knoll’s debut novel Luckiest Girl Alive (S&S; S&S Audio; OverDrive Sample). Based on its recent move up Amazon’s sales rankings, it is likely to hit best seller lists next week and may get an additional boost as  People‘s “Book of the Week” in the new issue, “the perfect page turner to start your summer.”

We named it a “Watch Title” for this week, based on reviews and GalleyChatters enthusiasm. Since then, holds have taken off with some libraries showing ratios as high as 9:1 on very light ordering.

Hollywood is also calling. Reese Witherspoon, who has developed an eye for domestic thrillers, having produced the film of Gone Girl, plans to adapt the novel for Lionsgate.

The Bram Stoker Awards for Superior Achievement in horror and dark fantasy were announced at the World Horror Convention in Atlanta, Georgia last weekend.

Steve Rasnic Tem won in the Novel category for Blood Kin (Solaris Books; OverDrive Sample) while Maria Alexander’s Mr. Wicker (Raw Dog Screaming Press) was selected as best First Novel. John Dixon took honors for best Young Adult Novel for Phoenix Island (S&S/Gallery Books; OverDrive Sample) and Jonathan Maberry won the Graphic Novel category for Bad Blood (Dark Horse Books; OverDrive Sample).

Jack Ketchum and Tanith Lee each received Lifetime Achievement Awards.

The full list of winners and nominees is available on the Horror Writers Association website.

Holds are spiking well over a 3:1 ratio at some libraries for Greg Iles’s The Bone Tree (HarperCollins/Morrow; HarperLuxe; Harper Audio; OverDrive Sample), the fifth novel in his Penn Cage series and the second in a 3-book arc that began last year.

The novel, which picks up where Natchez Burning left off, debuted on the NYT best seller list at the #4 spot on May 10 and moved down slightly to #6 on the May 17 list.

We listed it as one of the “Six Titles to Make You an RA Guru” the week of April 21 and The Washington Post’s Bill Sheehan gave it a glowing review yesterday, saying:

Like Natchez Burning, Iles’s latest is a hugely elaborate illustration of a famous line by William Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Iles puts his own distinctive stamp on that Faulknerian theme, and the result is a very American epic-in-progress that leaves us waiting, none too patiently, for whatever revelations are still to come.

Deadline Hollywood reports that Tobey Maguire is developing a cable series based on Natchez Burning, working with David Hudgins who was the co-showrunner for Friday Night Lights. The project is with Amazon Studios, which has ordered scripts for two episodes.

As season one of the Outlander series winds down on Starz (the finale airs May 30), shooting has begun on the next season.

Based on the second novel in the book series, Dragonfly In Amber (RH/Delta; 2001; Recorded Books; OverDrive Sample), it follows Jamie and Claire as they escape to France and try to stop the Jacobite rising.

Once again, it spans multiple time periods and also introduces new characters, including Jamie and Claire’s adult daughter Brianna, Fergus, Jamie’s spy and one-day-adopted son, and a young Lord John Grey.

According to the website zap2it, author Diana Gabaldon is pleased with the plans for season 2, saying:

The Parisian stuff is very good, and in fact I’m deeply impressed by the outlines I’ve seen of those scripts … I think they’ve done a wonderful job of pulling out the most important plot elements and arranging them in a convincing way …

Season two is slated to air in the spring of 2016, so fans will have to endure a year-long wait, or as they call it, #Droughtlander.

Christopher Bollen’s second novel,  Orient (Harper; HarperCollins and Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample) “might well be this summer’s most ambitious thriller or this summer’s most thrilling work of literary fiction” according to author Ivy Pachoda in her glowing LA Times review of Bollen’s second novel.

It is a review with plenty of juicy quotable lines for readers’ advisors to reference – especially when working with patrons who like their crime novels filled with high body counts and a thrumming sense of place.

And Pachoda knows a thing or two about capturing a strong sense of locale — she did it in her book Visitation Street (HarperCollins/Ecco; OverDrive Sample), set in Red Hook, Brooklyn. In her review of Orient she clearly appreciates a fellow author who is able to create a similar vibrant evocation of place, saying:

The Orient of Bollen’s novel is of course Orient Point, the town at the eastern-most tip of Long Island’s less fashionable North Fork — think Gatsby’s West Egg to Daisy’s East Egg — which has so far resisted the Ralph Lauren and McMansion uprising of the Hamptons to the south. But the artists are coming, scooping up pricy shorefront properties, gutting the charming homes, bringing their cavalier city ways and transforming the quaint town as they see fit.

Her quotes just get better, ending with this summary:

There’s a smorgasbord of delights in Orient, from its murderous plot to the cheeky fun Bollen has at the expense of the art world. And there is ample room in this expansive novel for surprisingly soulful descriptions of everything from the intricacies of beekeeping to the beauty of deer hunting. Most impressive is how Bollen’s book is rich in literary diversions, moments of keen sociological and emotional insight — often into personal isolation — that transcend the conventions of its story.

Pachoda is not alone in her admiration. USA Today offers another quotable line:

… a gorgeously written book whose literary chops are beyond doubt. Come for the prose, and stay for the murders.

Buried in Entertainment Weekly’s new issue, long after the “Baby Power List,” the lavish look at Quentin Tarantino’s “Bloody, Brutal Hateful Eight” and the excerpt of Stephen King’s upcoming Finders Keepers, (not online) comes the “Summer Books Preview.”

The full listing of 40 titles is not available online, but we’ve created an Edelweiss collection of all the titles so you can check for Digital Review Copies (NOTE: Ernest Cline’s hotly anticipated Armada, RH/Crown, just became available).

Below are links to the sections that are available online.

10 Big Fat Beach Reads To Look Out For This Summer

Hot Reads: 6 Sequels Coming To Bookshelves This Summer

5 Out-Of-This-World Tales To Read This Summer

Calling it the “next True Detective,”  the Hollywood trades announce that HBO is set to adapt Liane Moriarty’s best seller Big Little Lies (Penguin/Putnam/Einhorn), winning it away from Netflix in a competitive auction. Niclole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon are producing and plan to star. They originally acquired the rights to the book, planning to adapt it as a feature film.

Like True Detective, which burnished the careers of its two stars, Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, Hollywood watchers think this may do the same for Witherspoon and Kidman.

Both actress/producers have developed a taste for domestic thrillers. Kidman starred in Before I Go to Sleep, based on the novel by S.J. Watson (Harper, 2011). She’s also bought the rights to The Silent Wife, by A. S. A. Harrison (Penguin original trade pbk, 2013).

Reese Witherspoon recently optioned Watson’s upcoming mystery thriller Second Life (Harper; HarperAudio; HarperLuxe) and was a producer for Gone Girl, based on the novel by Gillian Flynn (RH/Crown, 2012).

Emily St. John Mandel has won the Arthur C. Clarke award, recognizing the best in Science Fiction, for her bestselling novel Station Eleven (RH/Knopf; RH & BOT Audio; Thorndike; OverDrive Sample).

The book, a post-apocalyptic tale that weaves back and forth in time as it follows the fate of several characters while also exploring the sustaining power of art, has racked up a litany of accolades.

A finalist for both the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner, it was picked as one of the Favorite of Favorites by LibraryReads, and made multiple best books of the year lists including Entertainment Weekly’s which selected it as their #1 pick.

As we reported, George R.R. Martin is on the bandwagon too, lobbying fans to support it for the Hugo award.

The genre categorization doesn’t sit well with Mandel. Responding to a review in the Washington Post’s “Science Fiction and Fantasy” column she told Ron Charles,

I was surprised to discover that if you write literary fiction that’s set partly in the future, you’re apparently a sci-fi writer … my only objection to these categories is that when you have a book like mine that doesn’t fit neatly into any category, there’s a real risk that readers who only read “literary fiction” won’t pick it up because they think they couldn’t possibly like sci-fi, while sci-fi readers will pick up the book based on the sci-fi categorization, and then be disappointed because the book isn’t sci-fi enough.

On the other hand, this offers readers advisors an opportunity to use Station Eleven to expand both SF and literary readers’ horizons.

Check your holds, they  are heavy in some libraries and trade paperback edition is scheduled for June 2,

The seven-part adaptation of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, is finally set to air on BBC America beginning June 13.

The U.S. trailer has just been released:

When the book was published in 2004, it went on to  become a hit, heralded by an profile of the author in the NYT Magazine. In the NYT Sunday Book Review, Gregory Maguire approvingly called it “Hogwarts for Grown-Ups,” saying, “Clarke’s imagination is prodigious, her pacing is masterly and she knows how to employ dry humor in the service of majesty.”

Today, the TV series is being compared to Game of Thrones.

The U.S. tie-in is scheduled for the end of this month.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke
Macmillan/Bloomsbury USA, May 26, 2015
9781620409909, 1620409909
Trade Paperback, $18.00 USD, $20.00 CAD

After a long hiatus, the film adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s second novel Dark Places has quietly been added to the domestic movie schedule, with a release date of August 8th.

Premiering in France earlier this year, it has a lot going for it, including the major success of the author’s previous adaptation, Gone Girl, and an A-list cast featuring Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, and Chloe Grace Moretz.

Theron worked to promote it, telling interviewers that she suffered a trauma similar to the one portrayed in the film, but trade reviews were not appreciative (The Hollywood Reporter was mixed but Variety was not).

Meanwhile, as we noted earlier, Flynn’s first novel, Sharp Objects, is being adapted as a TV series.

Flynn, who has a developing career in Hollywood, is now at work on an original script with 12 Years a Slave director Steve McQueen.

Tie-in:

Dark Places (Movie Tie-In Edition)
Gillian Flynn
RH/Broadway: June 2, 2015
9780553418484, 0553418483
Trade Paperback
$14.00 USD, $17.00 CAD

Pilot season is in full swing, with the networks announcing which of the hopefuls will make the transition to full series.

The Syfy channel has picked up Lev Grossman’s fantasy trilogy The Magicians as a 12-episode series. Set to begin shooting in Vancouver in July, it stars Jason Ralph (A Most Violent Year) as Quentin Coldwater.

Syfy has a few other book adaptations in the works. Coming in December, a series based on Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, (RH/De Rey).

Also set to premiere in December is The Expanse, based the series by James S.A. Corey, beginning with Leviathan Wakes, (Hachette/Orbit, 2011).

Coming some time next year, is a thriller series, The Hunters based on Whitley Strieber’s Alien Hunter, (Macmillan/Tor, 2013).

In addition, Syfy recently announced that they are isteaming with Steven Spielberg’s company Amblin TV for a series based on Aldous Huxley’s classic,  Brave New World.

Teasing Americans, BBC One has released a trailer for the seven-part adaptation of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which begins in the U.K.in May. It is set to air on BBC America, but the release date has not yet been announced.

Adding to the frustration, The Sunday Times of London says the series “could be magic” because it’s “a perfect fit for the new age of small-screen drama.”

Neil Gaiman writes in The Guardian how he fell under the book’s spell in 2004 and continues to love it to this day. The book’s author Susanna Clarke describes the weird sensation of seeing “my own characters walking about.  A playwright or screenwriter must expect it; a novelist doesn’t and naturally concludes that she has gone mad.”

The U.S. tie-in is scheduled for the end of this month.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke
Macmillan/Bloomsbury USA, May 26, 2015
9781620409909, 1620409909
Trade Paperback, $18.00 USD, $20.00 CAD